Culture - hitting the ‘pause’ button

Posted: 4th June 2014

What has a profound effect on your company’s reputation? What influences the environment that you work in? What encourages people to join your organisation and what are the reasons that people leave? What makes one team out-perform another? Why do some individuals succeed in your company and others flounder? There is one simple answer: culture, “the way things are done around here”.

The key to understanding culture is to ‘hit the pause button’ and remove yourself from the routine of everyday to take some time to wonder “why?” By taking this time to contemplate the system that you work in, you will start to recognise patterns. These patterns will be fundamentally affecting your culture and, ultimately, your ability to change.

We are human beings, not human doings. Isn’t it funny that we are rarely encouraged or given the space to stop and think about the reasons behind our actions or decisions? Taking this time out is seen as self-indulgent and yet, without doing this, how are we ever likely to succeed in truly tackling culture? Without taking this time, we are unable to ask ourselves why we are doing certain things:

• Is it serving us?
• Could we be doing something else?
• Could we be doing something better?

We miss the opportunity to cease behaving in a way that is not producing the results we, our employees and our customers need and deserve.

Do you press the pause button? Do you question the “way things are done around here”? Are you certain your company acts in a way that creates a healthy and productive environment? You’d be surprised by the answers you come up with.